After Hurricane Harvey, Houston’s Slow and Uneven Recovery Begins

As Hurricane Harvey heads east, Houston is entering a recovery stage. But, with some areas of the city still underwater, the process will be uneven.

Photograph by Mike Osborne for The New Yorker

When Hurricane Harvey hit southeast Texas, Houston, America’s fourth-largest city, became an unnavigable web of islands and devastation. The city’s vast, layered highway system—with its rises and dips, on-ramps and off-ramps, crossing bayous and reservoirs and swamps—was a gauntlet of rushing water and sudden roadblocks. West of Houston, fields turned into lakes, with brown water lapping at the sides of Highway 71 and threatening to overrun it. On the way in from Austin, at a farm near Plum, a bloated armadillo corpse bobbed in the water.

Then, on Tuesday afternoon, as the storm blew east toward Louisiana, the rain stopped. By mid-afternoon, the city’s drainage system had done its work, and Highway 288, which bisects central Houston and had transformed over the weekend into a deep river, was no longer flooded. It was simply wet. The receding waters had left behind detritus: shoes, shredded tires, home insulation, a light-blue Mustang with its convertible roof half torn. A few blocks west of 288, I found a homeless man, who introduced himself as Larry, sitting on the corner of San Jacinto and Binz Streets, near the Museum of Fine Arts. He seemed in a daze. “It was very strange,” he told me. “The water subsided very quickly. It was over that curb right there, but then it was all gone in about five or ten minutes.”

Under a church arch, Larry, a homeless man, watched the streets fill with water as the hurricane intensified.

Photograph by Mike Osborne for The New Yorker

Larry, who is in his fifties, said that he has been homeless since he was twelve. When he was three or four years old, he woke up at a hospital in Houston, and a nurse explained to him that his right eye was missing because he had been shot in the face, in a “domestic incident.” He told me that he never learned who did it, but, when he was twelve, his mother shot his step-father, and by the end of that year Larry was living in the city’s streets. Late last week, Larry noticed that the Museum of Fine Arts was stacking sandbags around its entrances. The next day, before Larry had ever heard of Hurricane Harvey, its winds were flinging debris at his body, and he went to hide beneath a small, open-air arch on the side of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church. Then came the rain. Huddled under a thick blanket, Larry watched the block fill with water, day after day.

Now he could finally leave the church. His blanket was sodden, his feet had pruned, and he hadn’t eaten since last Friday. The nearby shelter where he usually got sandwiches was shuttered. He used to pass the time circling letters in his book of word-search puzzles, but now the pages were rotting and the blue ink had run. “I’m on the waiting list for transitional housing,” he told me. “It’s been a few months now. I just gotta hope there’s no more storms like this one.”

Houston is entering a new stage, recovery. But the process will be uneven, and it is unclear who will fully recover and who will not. Many areas outside the city center are still underwater. During the storm, the Addicks Reservoir, to the west, which was constructed after the Second World War to help protect Houston from flooding, filled for the first time ever. When the water level surpassed a hundred and eight feet, it began to spill. To prevent an uncontrolled breech, the Army Corps of Engineers began a managed release of the reservoir into the nearest river, Buffalo Bayou. A Harris County police officer who had parked on the side of Interstate 10 told me that the situation in that section of the highway was worsening. “The water’s coming back up,” he said. “I got here around ten o’clock, and it wasn’t even on the feeder road.” Five hours later, the water was now encroaching into the westbound lanes of I-10. A few feet away, a red pickup truck was filled with water nearly to the top of its windows.

Two large vehicles pulled onto the shoulder of the highway to examine the scene. One driver, an Army veteran from San Antonio, named David Saunders, was towing a boat. A few minutes later, the trucks left, in convoy, to carry out rescues in areas that had been affected by the Addicks release. I drove behind them as they made their way to what was normally a creek; now it was a raging river that was pushing up against a concrete bridge. “The bridge is failing,” Saunders told me. It was too dangerous to launch the boat there, so he drove to the nearby neighborhood of Westlake and put it down in the middle of Saums Road, where the water was calm. Saunders set off with two other veterans. When he came back, almost two hours later, he told me that they had rescued about thirty people from homes in Cinco Ranch. “It was a mess over there,” he said. “The water was about thigh-deep in most of the houses. Everyone’s photographs were floating in the water. Their furniture was destroyed. There were a lot of older people, too.” Other volunteer rescuers told me that many locals whose homes were flooded were still refusing to leave. “One guy got pretty torn up by fire ants,” Saunders said. I had seen them floating in colonies, climbing up any solid surfaces they encountered.

As the sun set over the neat rows of suburban-style homes in Westlake, Kevin Maloney, who is thirty-one and works at the local Home Depot, arrived, by bicycle, to check out the flooding at Saums Road. “My wife’s friend—her third-floor apartment was flooded today, after they released the water from Addicks,” he said. “I don’t even know where these reservoirs are. I was just looking on the map to see if I was downstream.” Three military helicopters flew overhead, as a group of soldiers helped some civilian rescuers load their boat onto a trailer. A few blocks away, in the parking lot of the Brazos Valley Schools Credit Union, two flat shovels lay atop an inflatable mattress—a makeshift paddleboat, abandoned at the point where its occupants had hit land.